Turning a bad customer experience into a good one
Lastminute.com - keeping customers happy
Booking a holiday online should be a great experience, right? Well it was in my case - up until a small design flaw on lastminute.com messed it all up, that is.
It’s Monday night and I’m booking a city break to Berlin. Now, I always thought that any overview screen must have a ‘back’Â button, one that allows the user to go back and amend any errors. Lastminute.com apparently don’t quite agree with this and only let you “proceed to checkout” on the shopping basket overview screen. Well, I used my browser’s back button (that’s why it’s there, right?) to amend a passenger’s name and, to cut a long story short, this caused my entire shopping basket to disappear and my flights to get stuck in a database somewhere in the darkest corners of the Internet…
Can’t book, won’t book
Frustrated, I ended up booking a more expensive flight and feeling disappointed that a good overall experience was ruined by a design flaw and technical glitches. Lastminute.com kindly gave me the option to rant about this by filling in a very quick feedback form at the end of the booking process. And I mean very quick: 4 or 5 ratings on different aspects of the booking process, and a quick comment if I cared to leave one. I left a rather uninspired comment about the checkout process, thinking no one will bother reading it, and shut my computer down.
The next morning I received a personalised e-mail apologising for the issues and asking for more information about the problem. I replied with details on what went wrong (including some weird text on the website and the confirmation email - everyone who’s booked with lastminute must have seen it!) and, again, thought that nothing would happen.
A personal touch
The bit that turned all this into a positive experience and made me think “wow, they really do care about their customers” was the response I received yesterday, again apologising for the problems and offering a refund of the extra money I had to pay!
Now, that’s what I call a great customer experience. Things will occasionally go wrong, we all know that - it’s how different companies deal with this fact that makes them better or worse than their competitors. And lastminute.com seem to be great at that: keeping their customers happy, even when things go wrong.
Turning a bad experience into a great one
Since yesterday I’ve blogged about this, told my friends, the guys at work, my parents, everyone! A simple feedback form at the end of a booking process, properly followed up by customer services can turn any customer experience into a wow-experience! And a wow-ed customer spreading the word about their great experience is much better than a frustrated customer ranting about how disappointed they are. Way to go lastminute!
Find out how we can help your business offer an experience that will wow your customers! Drop us a line or call Chris on +44 207 1991 321.